NYTimes.com: In 2006, Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane in Basel, Switzerland, to look for geothermal energy—the heat simmering within Earth’s bedrock.
All seemed to be going well—until December, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.
Hastily shut down, Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco. The New York Times article has worried residents. AltaRock Energy has published a response to the article on their web site.
Somehow, I was never all that interested in geothermal energy perhaps because it rightly or wrongly seemed low-tech to me. As someone who was an elementary grade schooler when the Apollo Program was going full swing, I fell in love with what was then called futurology and became enamored with every form of advanced technology that I learned about.
But with the potential of advanced geothermal energy able to provide a whopping 60,000 times the total electrical energy we use in a single year, my green conscience says we must tap into this most valuable resource which not even nuclear winter could disrupt provided that the above ground infrastructure for the power plants remained intact.
The Earth has a volume of about 1 trillion cubic miles and an average interior temperature equal to about 2,000 K to 3,000 K and the heat that is lost to space is largely replenished by radioactive decay from unstable nuclei within the Earth’s mantel and core.
Because of the high heat capacity of molten silicate and the 5000 + K temperatures of the Earth’s core, on average, a cubic meter of Earth’s matter has the heat energy of roughly one cubic meter of TNT. Thus, the entire current supply of heat within the Earth’s interior (below the upper crust) is roughly equal to 2.1 x 10 EXP 21 tons of TNT or about 10 EXP 21 tons of oil burned in an ordinary oxygenated enviroment. It just so happens that the mass of the Earth is about 2.1 x 10 EXP 21 metric tons.
Assuming that we use about 2 billion metric tons of oil per year in this country or that we could after energy efficiency standards were raised and implemented, we in theory have enough heat to last us about 1 trillion years.
Now obviously, the energy is lost to space and so the Earth interior will not remain hot for 1 trillion years, but it could remain hot for the entire future lifetime of the Sun which is theoretically going to shine about 5.5 billion more years before the Sun swells to a red giant, eventually devouring and vaporizing Earth.
Should not we be thinking very seriously about geothermal energy. After reading a linked NY Times article, I think we must do much exploration of safe ways to extract geothermal energy.